Abstract : We consider the uplink of a one-dimensional 2-cell network with fixed base stations (BSs) and randomly distributed user terminals (UTs). Assuming that the number of antennas per BS and the number of UTs grow infinitely large, we derive tight approximations of the ergodic sum rate with and without multicell processing for optimal and sub-optimal detectors. We use these results to find the optimal BS placement to maximize the system capacity. This work can be seen as a first attempt to apply large random matrix theory to the study of networks with random topologies. We demonstrate that such an approach is feasible and leads to analytically tractable expressions of the average system performance. Moreover, these results can be used to optimize certain system parameters for a given distribution of user terminals and to assess the gains of multicell cooperation.